Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (59 page)

Last week—just before I was forced to fly up to Hong Kong for an emergency medulla transplant—the ARVN Eighteenth Division consisted of three regiments of two thousand men each, and they were making a surprisingly strong stand at Xuan Loc, in a battle that most military experts considered both the beginning and the end of “The Battle for Saigon.”

Well . . . If that’s true, we are in serious trouble down here. I can ponder the big map of Vietnam on the wall of the
Rolling Stone
Global Affairs Suite in the Hotel Continental and see that the distance between Bien Hoa and Saigon is just about the width of a Dunhill cigarette or maybe a penlight-size transistor radio battery, which is not very far—on the map or the highway or any other way you want to measure it. There is no doubt at all in the minds of the veteran war correspondents who now occupy almost every room in the Continental and also the Caravelle—about two hundred yards across Lam Son Square from my window—that the streets of Saigon could be full of VC sappers and NVA tanks at any moment . . . Which also means we might all find ourselves jolted out of bed by a chain-lightning blast of explosions outside or even inside the hotel at any moment, and the dawn streets of Saigon will be full of round-eyed, long-nosed journalists running like crazed rats toward one
of the “assembly points for emergency conditions” on the list just published yesterday by the U.S. Embassy.

These fourteen newly designated assembly points are mostly tall buildings with spacious rooftops in downtown Saigon, to which we can all flee and be picked up by U.S. Marine helicopters and ferried out to one of the Seventh Fleet aircraft carriers waiting offshore, then whisked off to the safety of the U.S. Naval Base at Subic Bay in the Philippines.

This is all stone madness, of course. If an incoming rocket blew the lobby of this hotel out from under me right now, I would quickly consult the emergency evacuation instructions and see that my “assembly point” is “3 Phan Van Dat”—which means absolutely nothing to me; it might as well be the address of a Coptic massage parlor in Macao, or maybe a street nickname for the number-three son of a once-proud South Vietnamese family, who recently turned to opium and bought himself a few suits of tailor-made, black-silk pajamas.

Probably some of the veteran war correspondents, sleeping heavily now in their high-ceilinged, tile-floored rooms up and down the dark hallway from mine, know exactly what “3 Phan Van Dat” means . . . But I am the only English-speaking person awake in the Continental at this hour, and even if I rushed out in the hall and began kicking savagely on every door I can reach—screaming: “Banzai! The jig is up!”—it wouldn’t cause much of a rumble, because at least half the denizens of this elegant old French colonial hotel tonight are either drunk, stoned, or helplessly paralyzed by opium.

The nine o’clock curfew imposed on Saigon by General Nguyen Van Thieu’s shaky government had a bad effect on the city’s social life. All bars, restaurants, and other public nightspots are closed by eight thirty—so the employees can get home before nine, when squads of young ARVN soldiers and ill-tempered military police begin roaming the downtown streets with orders to shoot anybody still moving around.

The object of the curfew is to discourage any VC sappers or other bomb-throwing terrorist types who might otherwise feel free to skulk around at night and cause trouble. But one of the most painfully visible side effects of the curfew has been to make us all prisoners from nine at night until six in the morning in whatever hotel we’re staying in: and after a month or so of this, a lot of people are starting to cave
in to almost any vice or noxious habit they can get their hands on. The styles of overindulgence seem to vary—in tandem with the political viewpoints—from one hotel to another. The Continental, for instance, is generally considered to be full of “pinkos and dope fiends” by the “old Asia hands” across the square in the Caravelle, where the political style is more hawkish and the vice style tends more to booze and brawling.

Last night in the Caravelle bar, an argument between some British newspaper correspondents and a group of pilots from Flying Tiger airlines erupted into violence and a serious beating for one of the Britishers . . . while the only casualties in the Continental last night occurred in a room just up the wide spiral staircase from mine, where a half-dozen American journalists were brought to their knees by a combination of opium, Pernod, and brutal Cambodian grass.

These are some of the people I would have to wake up and depend on for guidance in the event of a sudden rocket attack. This afternoon I tried to teach some of them to use the hellishly expensive but technically simple Transceiver radio units I brought back from Hong Kong—along with about a thousand hits of Lomotil and three quarts of a powerful antinausea medicine called Emetrol—but not even the sharpest of the
Time
and
Newsweek
correspondents could cope with a basic walkie-talkie unit.

After the weekly Saturday morning Viet Cong press conference in the tightly guarded VC (or PRG) compound at Tan Son Nhut air base—Saigon’s only remaining air link to the outside world—the mood of the strangely massive Caucasian press corps was so grim that many of them decided effectively to cash their U.S. Embassy PX cards by using up all their three-quart-per-month booze allotments in one final run on the PX. And since the embassy press office has still not approved my application for PX privileges, I decided to stay in the hotel with the master unit (a Sanyo Transworld Blue Impulse 7700) and establish the range effectiveness of the slave units by maintaining radio contact for as long as possible with the gaggle of flakes who planned to broadcast constantly back to the hotel from their jeep on the five-mile run through midtown Saigon traffic to the PX out by the air base.

This is the same nasty gauntlet we will all have to run when the hammer comes down and the embassy’s helicopter-evacuation plan is destroyed by fear-crazed mobs and fleeing ARVN soldiers firing M-16s
at the choppers from the smoking streets below . . . so it seemed like a good idea to run a field test on the radios and learn how to use them before the inevitable nightmare erupts.

But the test was a total failure. The
Time
man accidentally pushed a switch on the back of his unit and broadcast feverishly on the wrong frequency; and the
Newsweek
man failed to grasp the meaning of his “push to talk” button . . . leaving me in the hotel shouting futilely into my transmitter and receiving nothing but sporadic bursts of gibberish in Vietnamese . . . And then, about five hours later, I discovered both slave units were still turned on, a careless little oversight that drained twelve of the few remaining full-strength penlight batteries left in Saigon. There are plenty of them still for sale in the infamous “thieves’ market” a few blocks away, but most of those are either used or stone dead, and that is not the kind of batteries we will need in an emergency.

Indeed, perhaps the only thing almost everybody in Saigon can agree on right now is that none of us has the vaguest goddamn idea what we will either need, do, or even attempt when the volcano finally blows all around us—and our botched trial run with the Transceiver units bodes ill for our chances of coping with things like 130-mm artillery bombs blowing hot shrapnel and chunks of human flesh all over the streets and turning downtown Saigon into an Asian replay of the Last Days of Berlin.

Even if Tan Son Nhut Airport remains functional, the inevitable panic in the streets will make it impossible for most of us to get there anyway . . . And once the airport is either closed by rocket fire or cut off by hostile mobs, our only chance for evacuation will be the air fleet of huge “Jolly Green Giant” Chinook helicopters that the embassy plans to load us into at the “secret” assembly points.

Jesus, what a nightmare! Every one of the half million or so South Vietnamese who expects to be slaughtered when the VC and the NVA finally overrun Saigon knows the exact location of these assembly points and they all keep their FM radios tuned, day and night, to the American broadcast frequency, 99.9—just like those of us hunkered down here in the Caravelle and the Continental in the middle of town—for the “secret code message” that will announce the start of the evacuation. Right: a news bulletin saying “The temperature is 105 and rising,” followed by the first eight bars of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.”

And any Vietnamese who doesn’t have an FM radio and hasn’t heard about the assembly points can rush down to the shrunken “American Zone” around the big hotels along Tu Do Street and follow the first terrified round-eye he sees running along the maimed sidewalks with a suitcase in his hand. The noise of the huge Chinooks overhead will be deafening, especially when they start converging in a hail of rockets and automatic-rifle fire around the rooftops of a few tall buildings.

SX onpass Rolling Stone to Paul Scanlon, Rolling Stone, San Francisco Telex number RS 34 0337.

The phone lines are temporarily out of order here and I can’t call so here is how I see the situation. I will file another 2,000 or maybe a bit more if possible, which should start reaching you Monday afternoon or Monday night and Tuesday morning.

Thanx Hunter—NTL 1520PM

SX onpass Rolling Stone HST-Saigon . . . page one. To: Paul Scanlon . . . Rolling Stone . . . San Francisco Telex number RS 34 0337. From: Hunter Thompson . . . Global Affairs Desk . . . room 9.37, Continental Hotel . . .Saigon . . .April 20, 1975.

Everybody here is becoming very edgy and kind of bone-marrow nervous. Advance units of the NVA are now only five miles out of town and they could immobilize the airport at any moment with artillery fire and that would cut us off from all access to the outside world except by Marine helicopters. It’s also possible that a rocket could hit at any moment near enough to send me running over to UPI with whatever I have, hoping to get it on the wire before they begin operating under emergency conditions and not using their Telex for anything but their own copy. So if you stop receiving from me and don’t understand why, check with UPI and find out if the situation here has turned weird.

Loren Jenkins, the
Newsweek
bureau chief, just sent his local fixer out to the black market to buy us two flak jackets, two helmets, and maybe a few bayonets, which are suddenly a hot item here.

I’ve been trying to buy a revolver, but again for obvious reasons they cannot be had for any price at this time. Some of the press vets are
saying we should get some M-16s into this hotel, so the place can be defended—at least until the Marine choppers arrive—from rampaging mobs. So we are now looking at a sort of Alamo gig here in the Continental, although about half the press is against the idea because they figure any fire coming out of this hotel will merely attract fire from the uglies. I’m not sure how I feel about this at the moment, but I’m inclined to think having an M-16 around might not be a bad idea—not to use against the VC or the NVA, but against any panic-crazed mobs of deserters or savage locals who might figure the last Americans they’ll ever have a chance to get even with, as it were, are the 500 or so correspondents trapped downtown in the Continental and the Caravelle. You might also advise Jann that the three-unit, triangulated walkie-talkie system I brought back from Hong Kong is now being used by other press here in the hotel and in the event of a sudden emergency it will definitely be pressed into service by the people in charge of evacuation. When Phnom Penh was evacuated, the press had to abandon everything from their personal typewriters to network TV cameras . . . Ah, Jesus . . . here comes another nasty bit: I sent Laura Palmer out to the airport a few hours ago and she just came back with a tale of woe, madness, and panic among the frightened mob of Americans out there. The evacuation planes are now running all night (this just happened) and people are being shoveled into them like coal into a furnace. I get the same frenzied reports from other correspondents who spent most of the day out there . . . We have only two hours left before curfew, and I can’t get from here to UPI after nine tonight without risking being shot and the people at UPI have advised me not to take the risk because the ARVN troops and police out there in the street have orders to shoot anybody moving around and ask questions later.

We are in serious trouble down here in the eye of the hurricane. Saigon is Gen. Giap’s “ultimate military objective,” and he has spent the past week or so moving the elite 325th NVA “Steel Division” down from the North. The “Steel Division” is the one that cracked the French at Dien Bien Phu, and if Giap’s finely honed sense of drama and timing should tell us anything right now, it is that once the 325th (check this number with UPI, if possible) is ready to roll, the fate of Saigon will be sealed. Xuan Loc is already cut off—along with some 10,000 of the
ARVN’s best troops—and Bien Hoa has been under steady rocket and mortar attack for the past two days. Giap now has ten full-strength divisions surrounding Saigon, backed up with all the heavy 130s he needs and enough Russian- (and American-) built tanks to mount a final, high-speed blitzkrieg assault on Saigon any time he wants.

There are a lot of people here who think the ARVN will make a gallant last stand and hold for at least a few days at Bien Hoa before fleeing back into the city and turning it into another Da Nang scene . . . But my own feeling is that the battle for Saigon is already over, and once the Steel Division starts moving they will not even stop for a joint break until they get all the way into Saigon. And that is only a matter of hours.

. . . Jesus, I just got very repeat very reliable word that things have suddenly changed dramatically for the worse and we can expect the big move on Saigon to begin rolling tonight or tomorrow, but I can’t give any details via Telex for obvious reasons . . . But you can expect my copy flow to be interdicted, as they say, at any moment from now on, and in fact you may have to use this stuff as either the ending for the piece or as some kind of intro/editor’s note explaining why my story sounds so jerky, garbled, and unfinished. We are working under extreme tension here.